REFORM, NOT REVOLUTION
Wasserman, Harvey
REFORM, NOT REVOLUTION by HARVEY WASSERMAN HPo read today's press one would think that a monumental flaw had abruptly materialized within the texture of American youth and suddenly—there they...
...What is invariably missed is that a sexual revolution may say more about the sexual status quo than about the young or that a "psychedelic revolution" may say more about drug laws than drugs...
...Funds were being collected, literature passed out, rallies organized—all under administrative supervision...
...But a long accumulation of grievances, topped off by these issues, produced a blowup...
...Second, the universities were themselves caught between the students and the inevitable social reaction to their activities...
...All of a sudden the university administration began making it tough...
...The American student body must be one of the richest large subcultures the world has ever known...
...Freedom riders, many of them students, needed financial and moral support...
...HARVEY WASSERMAN is a 1967 graduate of the University of Michigan, where he was a Phi Beta Kappa and editorial director of "The Michigan Daily...
...The student upheaval has been a long time coming, has been prompted and indeed forced by innumerable social ills, and ultimately may be remembered more for its lack, rather than abundance, of support from students themselves...
...it was formally founded by Tom Hayden, then editor of The Michigan Daily, in 1960...
...In each case it was damned if it did, damned if it didn't—a conflict between student interests and Establishment demands...
...But the student revolt would be over...
...all four had student revolts last year...
...Finally, the administration refused to be swayed from its decision to provide class rankings of students to draft boards...
...For the universities the stepped-up war brought pressure from two directions...
...We were trying to collect money for going South and for working in the Oakland ghetto...
...In 1964 we didn't much care, at first, how they were running Berkeley," says Steve Weissman, one of the University of California's key student leaders...
...What is truly significant to me is not that the Sixties are so full of vigor, but that the Fifties have lasted so long at so many schools, and that they may soon be reborn at others...
...One can even wonder if the real reason we find the Sixties so active is the unconscious contrast with the apathy of the Fifties...
...The "now" generation is distinguished by its propensity for confrontation and a flair for "new things...
...In late 1965, 13,000 Michigan students petitioned for a university-owned bookstore...
...When the question of class ranking for the Selective Service System came up, it was the administrations again that made the decisions...
...Michigan, a wealthy campus with large professional and graduate schools and a long-standing reputation for apathy, had never before experienced large-scale demonstrations against its administration...
...In troubled times comes the reaction— black power and student power, a voice for the people in Vietnam, and a voice for the man who may soon be in the army...
...Next, in mid-November, a regulation banning sit-ins was secretly enacted two days after the student council was promised there would be no such action...
...Is it not natural that he who foots the bill should see his needs satisfied, and demand his say...
...What is significant about the new use of sex and drugs is that it involves an entirely new life-style, in many ways diametrically opposed to the one which the participants knew before they came to college...
...Neither of them asks for or recognizes the individual...
...The subject of civil rights is no longer a campus issue...
...The irony of the New Left is that in many ways it has not been revolutionary at all—at least not in the traditional sense...
...History does not bear out that analysis...
...One year later, in 1965, Ohio State University was shocked by demonstrations against a ban on Communist speakers...
...There has always been sex on campus...
...If the best-educated of young generations is "more interested in being than becoming," as one pundit put it, at least part of the reason is that it can afford simply "to be...
...Revolutionaries have almost always been identified by the . program they present...
...Unfortunately, reform may be as far as the New Left will get...
...The number who "drop out" of society may or may not be greater than ever—there was a beat generation in the Fifties...
...If the draft did not exist there would be little likelihood that most of our "now" generation would respond in alienation...
...The government needs these services, and so does big business...
...American universities have been repeatedly analyzed, with the generalized conclusion that they are large, impersonal institutions, apparently suited to only mass, dehumanized education...
...there is a hippie generation in the Sixties...
...The New Left preaches only democracy...
...Students are turning on, but students have always turned on—it used to be on alcohol...
...And the tragedy is that what the truly alienated are trying to say is just as badly missed as how they came to say it in the first place...
...There was summer work to be done, civil rights acts to be demonstrated for, funds to be raised...
...Wealth creates contentment to a much greater degree than it brings rebellion...
...Unlike the desperate job-seeking of depression days, there is a choice of well-paid careers for today's college graduate...
...The issue of HUAC alone, or the class ranking issue alone, would not have sufficed to create a revolt...
...A society keeps from exploding itself by changing, and generally it is the young who prompt that change...
...Under those circumstances, why did the universities' involvement with the CIA, the compliance with HUAC sub-penas, the discovery of secret war research, or the firing of Clark Kerr from the Berkeley presidency come as such surprises...
...nearly all large universities are governed by regents who are businessmen first...
...Its program is to take over the power structure and create new, smaller ones—to create a more equitable society...
...That would be absurd...
...Perhaps another barrage of issues might bring similar exacerbations...
...This fall he will be a Woodrow Wilson fellow in American history at the University of Chicago graduate school...
...What else are young people for...
...But that tells less than half the story...
...That drew fewer headlines...
...The real question is who gets what first—students or the Government, teachers or researchers, individuals or corporation men...
...The New Left is not without a program...
...probably there has always been drug use on campus...
...What is the real surprise of this college generation— that so many American youth seem to be challenging the traditional system, or that so few of them actually are...
...Every major university in the country receives a substantial share of its budget from the Government...
...The vast wealth available to today's student is far from rejected or even questioned by most...
...There are, to be sure, some unique sociological features about young people today that help explain their activity...
...When enough unpopular decisions had been made, students decided that there was a pattern involved, that the entire approach was wrong, and that the only solution would be to change the basic nature of the university...
...That's how the campus demonstrations started...
...An intellectually alienated core would continue to exist...
...The Berkeley revolt had brought activist tactics to the fore in students' minds...
...As it is, student deferments seem enough to keep anti-Establishment activities at a safe level...
...The universities in themselves represent important institutional underpinnings in the life of any established, technologically advanced system...
...The continued presence of those two rich and powerful forces guarantees that their demands will be met first...
...A University of North Carolina demonstration followed a few months later...
...When students asked that the university administration keep Ann Arbor city police away from rallies on the central campus, they were refused permission to speak with the administrator in charge...
...There were no strongly articulated grievances against the universities until they got in the way of civil rights activities...
...Communists had a specific new form of government and society in mind, as did socialists...
...At Michigan, at Berkeley, at Columbia, at City University of New York, the administrations opted for the Establishment...
...the social significance of what they are doing is not...
...But "democracy" in this case means a revolution in the fullest sense, because it means turning over power to people—primarily poor, black, and young people—with interests different from those currently in power, and on whom those currently in power are in large part dependent...
...The following summer, tuition and dormitory fees were increased...
...There is a sexual revolution too, and it is interesting to speculate whether the number of new arrivals at the barricades may have been swollen somewhat by the newspaper writers who know older people like to read about such things...
...One thing is clear— the students are not winning...
...The petition was refused...
...The Vietnam War continues as a constant reminder of the powerlessness of the youthful left...
...The average university student is shockingly uninformed about the Vietnam War, in which he may soon kill or be killed...
...Such a shift in power would indeed mean social upheaval in terms of civil rights, education, the power of the military and, to some extent, in moral values...
...Although a great many middle-class youth are personally caught up in politically unsatisfying situations, only a fraction of them become activists...
...True...
...A "wrong" decision would inevitably bring the same outbreak of frustration as had occurred at Berkeley...
...But what is missed is the main question—why are they like that...
...First, as anti-war activities (led by newly-converted civil rights groups such as SDS) became more frequent, the universities found themselves with more and more decisions to make...
...education is being questioned on a visible scale only because of the war issues...
...Were the war to end tomorrow, the number of young American "revolutionaries" would quickly halve...
...But 1965 was far more important for another reason—the escalation of the war in Vietnam...
...In the eyes of the New Left, the American economic system has produced abundance, but the sociopolitical system has left control and distribution in the hands of a few...
...W'hat is new is not quantity, but that it is done openly, in a style of life aimed specifically at the unsatisfying one that preceded it...
...They are personally analyzed...
...Indeed, it is welcomed, old values and all...
...When the House Un-American Activities Committee issued subpenas for lists of members of antiwar groups on campuses, it was the university administrations, through their offices of student organizations, which had to decide whether to comply or not...
...The now-defamed Students for a Democratic Society had its precursor on the University of Michigan campus almost ten years ago...
...In August 1966, the HUAC subpena was complied with by the administration, and the names of sixty-five students and faculty were sent to HUAC without notification to those involved...
...REFORM, NOT REVOLUTION by HARVEY WASSERMAN HPo read today's press one would think that a monumental flaw had abruptly materialized within the texture of American youth and suddenly—there they were on the picket lines...
...Each year that it goes on marks the further entrenchment of a way of life which the New Left is probably too little and too late to change significantly—or even to avoid joining eventually...
...They provide research, adult professional personnel, and new recruits to man the system...
...The answer seems plain enough: because they rest on the same structures that support mass, dehumanized societies...
...The issue then was not who ran the university, but civil rights...
Vol. 31 • August 1967 • No. 8
